While the use of electronic devices continues to grow, an increasing number of users of these devices desire to incorporate the use of small computer devices with their other computing systems. For example, users often desire to incorporate voice mail messages, electronic mail (email), short message service (SMS) messages, contacts, notes, calendar-type application appointments, and/or tasks between their mobile, or handheld, devices and their client computer or server at their place of employment and/or home. Such incorporation allows users to track their messages, email, calendar-type application appointments, contacts, notes, and/or tasks, etc. from nearly any location and at any time of day with their mobile device. While such incorporation is desired, it is also desired to synchronize these voice mail messages, email, calendar-type application appointments, contacts, notes, and/or tasks, etc. amongst the user's mobile device(s), client computer(s), and server(s) such that changes made at any of the devices may be reflected across all devices.
However, when a particular folder or collection of items is synchronized, a common schema is typically applied to all items, e.g., email, voice mail, calendar-type application appointments, tasks, contacts, notes, etc., in that folder regardless of the differences in the classes of items present in the collection. Further, the same options are applied to all classes within the collection. For example, the same filters are applied to each class, as well as the same truncation and body type settings. Where all classes are synchronized altogether and according to a common schema for the entire folder, the synchronization of some class items may be lost where one of the computing systems does not support the particular class of items. For example, a mobile device may not support the receipt of tasks, for example. Alternatively, the user may experience a poor viewing experience in attempting to open a particular message not supported by its system.
Although specific problems have been addressed in this Background, this disclosure is not intended in any way to be limited to solving those specific problems.